March 20, 2006
In
a short editorial, the Detroit News asked an interesting question:
"Some
war critics are suggesting Iraq terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
should have been arrested and prosecuted rather than bombed into
oblivion. Why expose American troops to the danger of an arrest,
when bombs work so well?"
Here’s
one possible answer: In order not to send a five-year-old Iraqi
girl into oblivion with the same 500-pound bombs that sent al-Zarqawi
into oblivion.
Of course,
I don’t know whether the Detroit News editorial
board, if pressed, would say that the death of that little Iraqi
girl was "worth it." Maybe the board wasn’t even
aware that that little girl had been killed by the bombs that killed
Zarqawi when it published its editorial. But I do know one thing:
killing Iraqi children and other such "collateral damage"
has long been acceptable and even "worth it" to U.S. officials
as part of their long-time foreign policy toward Iraq.
This U.S.
government mindset was expressed perfectly by former U.S. official
Madeleine Albright when she stated that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from
the U.S. and UN sanctions against Iraq had, in fact, been "worth it."
By "it" she was referring to the U.S. attempt to oust
Saddam Hussein from power through the use of the sanctions. Even
though that attempt did not succeed, U.S. officials still felt that
the deaths of the Iraqi children had been worth trying to get rid
of Saddam.
It’s
no different with respect to President Bush’s war on Iraq and
the resulting occupation, which has killed or maimed tens of thousands
of Iraqi people, including countless children. (The Pentagon has
long had a policy of not keeping count of the number of Iraqi people,
including children, it kills.) In the minds of U.S. officials, the
deaths and maiming of all those Iraqi people, including the children,
while perhaps unfortunate "collateral damage," have, in
fact, been worth it.
That’s
why U.S. officials gave nary a thought to the death of that five-year-old
girl who was bombed into oblivion with the bomb that did the same
to Zarqawi. The child’s death was "worth it" because
the bomb also killed a terrorist, which U.S. officials believe,
brings the Middle East another step closer to peace and freedom.
Wars of
aggression versus defensive wars
Some would
argue that such "collateral damage" is just an unfortunate
byproduct of war. War is brutal. People get killed in war. Compared
with the two world wars, not that many people have been killed in
Iraq, proponents of the Iraq war and occupation would claim.
Such claims,
however, miss an important point: U.S. military forces have no right,
legal or moral, even to be in Iraq killing anyone. Why? Because
neither the Iraqi people nor their government ever attacked the
United States. The Iraqi people had nothing to do with the 9/11
attacks in New York and Washington. Thus, this was an optional war
against Iraq, one that President Bush and his military forces did
not have to wage.
The attack
on Iraq was akin to, say, attacking Bolivia or Uruguay or Mongolia,
after 9/11. Those countries also had nothing to do with the 9/11
attacks and so it would have been illegal and immoral for President
Bush to have ordered an invasion and occupation of those countries
as well. To belabor the obvious, the fact that some people attacked
the United States on 9/11 didn’t give the United States the
right to attack countries that didn’t have anything to do with
the 9/11 attacks.
That made
the United States the aggressor nation and Iraq the defending nation
in this conflict. That incontrovertible fact holds deep moral implications,
as well as legal ones, for U.S. soldiers who kill people in Iraq,
including people who are simply trying to oust the occupiers from
Iraq. Don’t forget that aggressive war was punished as a war
crime at Nuremberg.
Suppose an
armed robber enters a person’s home and the owner’s neighbor
comes over to help him. The homeowner and his neighbor fire at the
robber who fires back, killing both the homeowner and his neighbor.
Can the robber
claim self-defense? No, because he had no right to be in the home
in the first place. The intruder is guilty of murder, both morally
and legally, because he doesn’t have the right to be where
he is when he shoots the homeowner and his friend.
The situation
is no different in Iraq because U.S. soldiers don’t have any
right to be there. "But they were ordered to invade Iraq by
their commander in chief." They could have refused to obey
orders to deploy to Iraq, just as Lt. Ehren Watada has done. Watada refused to loyally obey the orders
of his commander in chief. Instead, he chose to obey his conscience
and also to fulfill the oath he took to support and defend the Constitution.
Many Americans
have a difficult time processing this because they simply want to
block out of their minds that their own federal government –
the paternalistic government that takes care of them with Social
Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, and education and protects
them from drug dealers, immigrants, terrorists, and big oil –
would ever do anything gravely wrong.
Let’s
put the situation this way. Suppose a coalition of Muslim countries
successfully invaded the United States to overthrow the Bush regime
and that foreign troops were now occupying the country and supervising
new elections. Suppose some Americans began violently resisting
the occupation and that British citizens came over to help them.
While there undoubtedly would be some Americans supporting the foreign
occupation of America and cooperating with it, my hunch is that
most Americans would support the resistance.
Or put it
this way: Suppose it was the Soviet Union that had done everything
to Iraq that the U.S. government has done: imposed brutal sanctions
that contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children,
invaded Iraq, and then had Soviet troops occupying the country while
organizing elections, killing insurgents and resisters, censoring
the press, confiscating guns, conducting warrantless searches, detaining
people without trials, and torturing and sexually abusing detainees.
Is there any
doubt that a large segment of the American people, especially conservatives
and neo-conservatives, would be railing like banshees against the
Soviet communist forces in Iraq?
War versus
occupation
Moreover,
what people often forget is that the United States is no longer
at war in Iraq. This is an occupation, not a war. The war ended
when Saddam Hussein’s government fell. At that point, U.S.
forces could have exited the country. (Or they could have exited
the country when it became obvious that Saddam’s infamous WMDs
were nonexistent.) Instead, the president opted to have the troops
remain in Iraq to "rebuild" the country and to establish
"democracy," and the troops opted to obey his orders to
do so. Occupying Iraq, like invading Iraq, was an optional course
of action.
As an occupation
force serving a sovereign regime, U.S. forces are not engaged in
a war but instead are simply serving as a domestic police force
for the sovereign Iraqi regime. The problem, however, is that they’ve
been trained as soldiers, not policemen.
The military
mindset is totally different from the police mindset. Assume that
there is a suspected terrorist hiding among 10 innocent people.
How would the military and the police deal with that situation?
The military
would not chance the suspected terrorist’s escaping or his
killing a soldier in a gun battle. As we have seen in the al-Zarqawi
killing, the military would simply drop a bomb on the suspect, even
knowing that the innocent people around him would also be killed.
In the mind of the military, the "collateral damage" would
be worth it, even if it included children.
This military
mindset was put on display a few years ago by a CIA paramilitary
operation in Yemen. Convinced that an automobile in Yemen was being
driven by an al-Qaeda terrorist, the CIA fired a missile into the car, killing all six people in
the car, including an American citizen. As the Detroit News
would ask, why bother with trying to capture the suspects and then
go through all the hassles associated with extradition and trial
when one missile can do the trick? And how exactly do we know that
everyone in the car was guilty of terrorism and deserving of the
death penalty? Because the CIA (which claimed that there were WMDs
in Iraq) said so.
Consider another
real-world example. A few years ago, the Washington, D.C., area
was terrorized by two gunmen who were sporadically shooting and
killing people at random. The police were having a very difficult
time capturing them. One day, someone spotted the suspected snipers
parked at a highway roadside park where lots of other cars were
parked.
Taking the
chance that the suspected snipers could escape to kill again, the
cops slowly surrounded the roadside park. They then approached the
car and took both of the suspects into custody, after which they
were tried and convicted.
What would
have been the military response? Drop a couple of 500-pound bombs
on them, just as they did with the terrorist Zarqawi. After all,
in the words of the Detroit News, why take the chance
that the suspects could escape and kill even more people? So what
if the bystanders, including children, would be also killed in the
process? That collateral damage would be worth it because the suspects
would very likely have gone on to kill more people than the bombs
did. Of course, the dead would include American children, rather
than Iraqi children, but certainly that wouldn’t be an important
distinction to the Pentagon, or would it?
That raises
another distinction between the military and the police. It’s
not difficult to see that the military holds the Bill of Rights
in contempt, which is precisely why the Pentagon established its
torture and sex abuse camps in Cuba and former Soviet-bloc countries
– so as to avoid the constraints of the U.S. Constitution and
any interference by our country’s federal judiciary.
It is not
a coincidence that in the Pentagon’s three-year effort to "rebuild"
Iraq it has done nothing to construct a judicial system that would
have independent judges issuing search and arrest warrants or that
would protect due process, habeas corpus, jury trials, and the right
to counsel. To the military, all that is anathema, not only because
it would presumably enable lots of guilty people to go free but
also because it might inhibit the ability of the military to take
out people without having to go through all those legal and technical
niceties.
Several months
ago, a U.S. attorney told a federal court of appeals that the United
States is as much a battleground in the war on terrorism as other
countries in the world, including Iraq. Heaven forbid that the American
people ever permit the U.S. military to expand to the United States
the war-on-terrorism tactics it has employed overseas.
More important,
all too many Americans have yet to confront the moral implications
of invading and occupying Iraq. U.S. officials continue to exhort
the American people to judge the war and occupation on whether it
proves to be "successful" in establishing "stability."
and "democracy" in Iraq. If so, the idea will be that
the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, including countless Iraqi
children, will have been worth it. It would be difficult to find
a more morally repugnant position than that.
June
20, 2006
Jacob
Hornberger [send him mail]
is founder and president of The Future
of Freedom Foundation.
Copyright
© 2006 Future of Freedom Foundation